A Tale of the India Pale Ale

Scholars continue to argue fervently about the truth behind the mysterious origins of the India Pale Ale (IPA). And to this day, the list of wars that have started over this debate are countless.

Yet, there are some wizards and normal lay-people who believe it to be a gift from the Hanuman, the Indian deity who wanted to sleep with British women. The story follows that Hanuman was disfigured shorty after birth (in Sanskrit: hanu = jaw and -mant = disfigured/prominent). No one wanted to be his girlfriend...or boyfriend for that matter. Over the ages, he was always well-known as being a foolish, monkey god, who dances and sings, often prancing around like a little fairy. So on top of being ugly he simply wasn't very manly, and let's face it, British women didn't want to bed an Indian monkey to begin with.

So Hanuman dug around in his bag of tricks and created a potion that he gave out in pint-size samples to the East India Company from Great Britain. The traders loved the potion so much that they requested to know the recipe from Hanuman, lest they take their beautiful women back home to England and let Hanuman keep working at the local circus in Delhi. Hanuman, no longer wanting to work with the evil circus masters and desiring the fair-skinned women of the British Isles, decided to make a deal.

Hanuman told the East India Company that he would give over the brew's recipe as long as he could have 13 soirees with a different British lass for 13 consecutive nights. The traders agreed fairly quickly, as they had grown tired and bored with their women anyway, and told Hanuman that he could keep them and were probably going to sail away and never come back to the God-forsaken land in the first place. 

So The East India Company learned the recipe of the IPA, which they named after it being a paler ale than their usual counterparts. They found that coke-firing the malts produced less smoke and gave a lighter toasting to the barley, which as a result created a lighter color in the brew. Later as an afterthought, the traders decided to put India at the front because that's where they discovered the ingredients. Luckily, this overruled the naming sought from most of the native India population who wanted the ale to be called Hanuman's Piss.

Needless to say, Hanuman couldn't care less about the name, after all, they were just potions to him and he could probably make dozens different flavors if he really wanted to. In addition, he was excited to have his 13 British women to take out for a evening on the town. Unfortunately, his ideas for making monkey-love never came to fruition, as he made the mistake not once, nor twice, but 13 times in a row of getting his date so drunk they she barfed relentlessly until the next morning.

The end.

*I for one don't believe this story, as many British women at the time were in fact quite keen to monkey-love. But hey, every myth has a kernel of history to it.